Königstein

The Hammergut Neidberg first appears in writing in 1470, when a smithy here passed from one brother to another. Even then the buyer was already the fourth owner on record, which means the ironworking is older than the oldest surviving document. The house you sleep in was built in 1661, by a chamberlain of the Saxon court, after the Thirty Years' War had left the estate recorded as ruined and abandoned. The carved stone surrounds he had cut for the doors and windows are still in place.

What made this narrow valley worth building in was water and ore. The Biela runs high and steady enough to drive hammers year-round, and five ironworks stood along it — Oberhütte, Brausenstein, Neidberg, Reichstein and the works at Königstein — smelting magnetite carted over from the mines at Berggießhübel. Their product was known across Saxony as Pirnisch Eisen, and it was no ordinary trade good. It was a sovereign monopoly: in 1492 the local lords ceded their share in the mines "and the four hammers" to the Elector himself. In 1537 the master of this hammer kept fourteen horses and was required to furnish two of them to the Elector's war wagon.

The iron left the valley as bar iron for the electoral depot at Pirna, and as castings — stove plates, salt pans and cannonballs. Those castings went to the arsenal in Dresden and to the fortresses: Königstein, eight kilometres down this same valley, and Stolpen. Stand on the fortress walls today and look south-west into the hills, and you are looking at where the iron came from.

Neidberg's own part in that story ran to 1792, when an ironmaster from Lohmen was licensed to build a tool, iron and weapons hammer on the site. A Saxon gazetteer of 1819 lists it as a royal hammer works with one hammer, one smithy and one mill, twenty inhabitants, four horses and thirty head of cattle.

Then the visitors came. By the 1820s travel writers were sending readers up this valley to see the waterfall on the mill race and the rock grotto in what they called the Princess Garden, and at Madame Grahl's garden house you could get a glass of milk and a slice of buttered bread. In 1832 the owner applied for a licence to run an inn.

Work on the site continued until July 1991 — more than five centuries of hammering, milling and sawing. Most of the buildings came down afterwards. The surviving dwelling was bought from the municipality in 2016 and restored to heritage standards in 2017/18. Its four apartments are named after the people recorded as living here in 1548: the master, the coachman, the maids, the farmhands.